A blog about search, search skills, teaching search, learning how to search, learning how to use Google effectively, learning how to do research. It also covers a good deal of sensemaking and information foraging.

Thursday, January 31, 2013

I solved this challenge by first finding the name of the
place. That’s usually a good place to
start—so I went with:

[ trailer park El Camino Real palo alto CA ]

Finding out quickly that it’s called the “Buena Vista Mobile
Home Park.” Notice that I’d called it a
“trailer park” in my question, but that the name of the place is “mobile
home.” The knowledge panel on the right
hand side gives me a good set of data, including the address at 3980 El Camino
Real Palo Alto, CA 94306

Armed with a name and an address, it’s pretty simple to look
up the history:

[ Buena Vista Mobile Home Park Palo Alto ]

And that leads to many historical articles (e.g., ones in
the NYTimes or the local online newspaper, Palo Alto Online) where you’ll find
that it began as a roadside stop between downtown Palo Alto and Mountain
View. It started up in 1926 as a tourist
camp, with simple, small cabins arriving later, along with a café (“Chat and
Chew”).

you can find a number of different demographics data
suppliers. But after poking around for a while, I found that most of them just
provide aggregate data for the entire city.
What I really wanted was the ability to drill down into that particular
neighborhood.

I found that I could use City-Data.com to get pretty
close. If you look at the map of the
park area for a while and zoom out just a bit, you’ll see the names of individual
neighborhoods appear. (I’ve circled them
in the map below.)

While this is neighborhood data set is a bit larger that
what want (for example, it includes a few hundred homes in the $800K+ range),
it starts to give you a sense for the place.
Median rent is $1512. (A quick
price comparison on Zillow.com in the neighborhoods nearby will show you this
is WAY below market rates for this area.)

I also found that I could do a search on the street address
of BVMHP at 411.com and get a pretty complete listing of people living in the
park.

By just scrolling through the list of names and ages, you
can quickly see that the trailer park is around 75% Hispanic (Martinez, Valdez,
Montes, Robles, Ramirez, etc…) with a decidedly older tendency than for the
rest of Palo Alto (I counted ~25% older residents). I could have dropped all the data into a
spreadsheet and done a pretty accurate count, but this was sufficient for our
purposes.

(FWIW, I also tried to use the census data at Census.gov but
was frustrated by how slow it was and how difficult to use. Did anyone have success using that
approach?)

What about those doughnuts?

At the bottom of that first article is a link to the historyof the place, which
actually tells the story about the “Chat and Chew” and the cost of
doughnuts. But suppose you didn’t see
that. How would you search?

To find the price of doughnuts, I’d do a simple search using
the wild card operator:

[buena vista palo alto "doughnuts for * dozen" ]

But note that if I’d spelled “doughnuts” as “donuts,” this
approach wouldn’t have worked! If that had been my only strategy, I would have
also tried:

[buena vista palo alto ~donuts for dozen ]

and left out the quotes for more generality. Here, the ~ in front of the word “donuts”
looks for synonyms are other spellings (e.g., “doughnuts”)

Also notice that I did NOT use “per dozen.” Why not?
I actually tried that first, and didn’t get anything. So I went for the more generic phrase, “for *
dozen” thinking that would include any probable rewrite. And I was right.

In 1932 at the “Chat and Chew” you could get a dozen
doughnuts for $0.35 / dozen, just under 3¢ each. Those were simpler, or at least cheaper, times.

Search lessons: As I mentioned in my 1MM last week, sometimes
you really need another tool—in this case, a database that has the information
you need within. By first finding the
proper name of the place, then using that to reverse-find on the address with a
special tool (in this case, 411.com and City-Data.com) we’re able to learn a
lot of otherwise unfindable information.
But now you know how!

Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Not far from where I live there’s a trailer park that’s at
the roiling center of a local controversy.
It’s located on El Camino Real (in Palo Alto, CA), a bustling street
with high property values in a residential neighborhood at the heart of Silicon
Valley.

Now, of course, a developer is considering developing it for
other purposes. The controversy is about
whether or not this is about maximizing property values by displacing people
who don’t have a strong voice in city politics.

Suppose you’re an investigative reporter trying to figure
out a bit of the backstory here. A few
questions would spring immediately to mind.
And these questions are this week’s search challenge. It's not immediately obvious how you might search these out, but I hope you'll find a way. Tune in tomorrow for the story of how I did it.

(1) Who lives there now?
Can you tell me the ages and ethnicities of folks who live there? (As a group.
Don’t give us a list of their names!)

(2) What’s the history of the place? How long has it been there? When did it start?

(3) For extra credit:How much were a dozen doughnuts at the café in the first few years after it was established???

As usual, please let us know HOW you solved the problem, and
how long it took you to find the answers.
If you can...

Thursday, January 24, 2013

Quick answer: The
brick circles show the outlines of underground cisterns of water that can be
used to fight fires even when the city’s regular water supply is broken.

The details…

First, I’m impressed that so many people recognized San
Francisco, the City by the Bay, from the pictures I showed. I guess it’s not a completely wild guess,
given where I work and those hills in the background, but still—that’s impressive deduction!

The fastest route to solving this challenge was simply to
type in the simplest possible description of what you can see in the
images. This is case:

[ brick circles ]

.. and then let autocomplete give you a suggestion for San
Francisco. If you take the suggestion
and run the query:

[ brick circles San Francisco ]

There are a number of sources that give various versions of
the answer. Let’s talk about those
versions for a moment.

The circles mark cisterns for emergency fire-fighting water
supplies that were put in place after the great 1906 earthquake and fire that
destroyed most of the city.

Are
the cisterns pressurized? Many readers gave solutions that commented on the cisterns
being pressurized. They could be, but
keeping large underground tanks pressurized for more than 100 years would be an
engineering challenge. (Especially in a
place like San Francisco, which has its fair share of earthquakes.) What’s more, since the cisterns were built in
response to the great earthquake and fire of 1906, the engineers realized that
they couldn’t rely on having power or intact water lines throughout the entire
city. This led to the design of the
cisterns as more-or-less stand-alone reservoirs. As this page from the SF fire department illustrates, there are actually 4 different water
supplies for fire fighting in San Francisco.

(1) The high pressure system (most US cities have this—it supplies the
ordinary fire hydrants at curb-side).

(2)
The low pressure system just taps into regular drinking water supply—these
hydrants are all white.

(3) Sea water system. There are 52
suction connections along the northeastern waterfront that allow fire engines
to pump water directly from the Bay.
Both city-owned fire boats can also supply saltwater to the system by pumping
into any of five manifolds.

And finally,

(4) Cisterns—these are the big tanks of water
(usually around 75,000 gallons each) that are under key street
intersections. They are unpressurized,
but the water can be pumped out through the green-topped hydrants. On the site SFFD says “…the cisterns have no
connection to either the Water Department or high pressure supply system. They
are under continual inspection by the Fire Department and are kept full by the
Bureau of Engineering and Water Supply.”
That is, they go around every so often and pour water in them, usually from the low-pressure system.

Search Lessons: READ
CAREFULLY! Several readers passed along
information that the cisterns are part of the pressurized system. I looked at all of the references that
readers gave, and I can see why you might make that inference. But if you read carefully, in most cases
you’ll see it’s not actually implied… but merely a co-occurrence of a
discussion about the “pressurized system” next to the discussion about
cisterns. Careful not to overread. Pay attention to where and when the topic
changes. (And, of course, always look
for a non-copied confirmation in a second source.)

And.... Don’t assume you know the answerjust because it seems
obvious. The circles are NOT cable car turnarounds. This is an example of jumping to a
conclusion due to priming. Because San
Francisco is well-known, and well-known for cable cars, the conclusion that
these circles are cable car turnarounds seems obvious—but remember to check your work!

Search on!

__________

Post script: Regular reader Carolyn sends in this note: "I found a photograph of one of the San Francisco cisterns, taken during the ongoing auxiliary water supply upgrade. This photo won a place among Engineering News-Record's 2012 Year in Construction best photos."

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

I was walking the other day and came across part of a
fragment of a stone circle embedded in the street.

That was odd, but I didn’t think much of it until a little
while later I happened to come across a full circle, also laid perfectly in the street, made
entirely of bricks.

Once is odd, but twice makes me pay attention.

When it happened a THIRD time, I started wondering why the
city would be making such interesting marks on the pavement. Is this the rise of a new Stonehenge
culture? Could it be the mason’s version
of crop circles? Maybe they're secret ICBM missile silos!

Today’s challenge:
What are these circles? Why and
when were they made? How many more can I
expect to find? Finally, in what city do
these circles appear?

As always, please let us know what the answer is, and most
importantly, HOW YOU SOLVED the challenge!If you’d include a time estimate on how long it took, that would be
great too.